 He's the author of Advice for Lovers, which is out on City Lights, Gowanus Atropoulos, and the co-editor of No Gender, Reflections on the Life and Work of Carrie Edwards. Please welcome Julian Telemantez-Brolasky. Look, gentle people. The only source of likelihood is a fist in a gentle orifice. If I'd have been a ranch, they'd have called me bar none. A feckoned desert full of heartless so-and-sos. The tub of butter thereafter was rancid. We put zur and zur mouth to rest along with the chickens in our maw. Hey blood, hey sucka, as like to one is to the other. Do you love your sibling? As they do. As they do. So thank you all for coming. It's a real honor for me to be reading with this lineup and and thank you to the library for hosting and to Michelle for inviting me to this. This is a poem called Band Poetry Words and it has an epigraph from the Wu-Tang Clan. It's not the Russian. It's the Wu-Tang Krushan. Slip up and get creped like Suzette. Travel on to that earth's wild millia. Steeped in toxins, ever flushing them out. Along the crick, the fried fishlings foam and soak their minor manticores. Battered eyeballs batting at you. The way the waves and the painting curve, so many tell-tale infernal tickings. I knew I had to stop writing nonsense. Jack Spicer laughed and laughed, but Kim Lyons wasn't laughing at me and Brenda E. G. Med definitely wasn't fucking laughing. And I used a poem with all the band poetry words. Poetry, angels, filigree, aperture, rococo, churuscuro, especially fucking aperture, most band poetry word. There are more I reckon. Paul's was thighs. So if you have any more to suggest to me, come tell me afterwards. This is called Against Breeding with apologies to pregnant people. It really should be, it doesn't really imply to queers, it really should be like Against Idiots Breeding. Against Breeding for C.A. Conrad. Garbage-gut humans should not continue ourselves. It can only come a frightful cropper. Hair bulbs would I mistook to be a form in nature. Albatross with plastics crowding their gut. What Julie Patton is calling, Superfragia, Lily of the Valley, Veronica, Heterofilia, Snapdragon Nature Preserve. Pulp them, Shropshire, Constabulary, Queen of Haven, Sailing for Caracas with a gun in its sling. Sissy Jesus Hag. Point to the exact place where the flies should go and the ballow under pants. Just where the points come to an end triangulately. Fifteen thousand fish dead at the mouth of the Mississippi. Plains go sip, sip, saying to the poor people, Walk fast, walk like you're on hot coals. Matisse had to get up real close to see that was a bird. Turn that veal de gamba right forwards and added a noose. Even more cliche than peaches in a bowl. Curvy long pear stem and butter dish suspended in air. Perhaps the stem is penetrating a clear butter dish, Conrad suggested. And I knew I was being drawn into a fun house of mirrors, but I couldn't stop. Odilon, Radone, Roger and Angelica. Why I am against breeding. The death of script. I can't go kicking this rusty blade no further. We can all name ourselves Smurfs when the terrors of modernity seem quaint. Plash of water. Monumental tree trail. Triple faggot. Only gods themselves. Short buff gay. A Gog and eight foot waves of totally tubular efflorescence. Remembers those impassioned tweets on the theme of cursive handwriting. So this is like a retranslation of a Sappho poem. It's called some say an army of horse people. Some say soon the handle will fall right off. Only to be ambiguated by a single letter. Who hath bespoke. Whelis. Fine upright. Who sat bolt upright in their coffin. Look, it's Victor Hugo, the great poet talking to Chopin. Who hath commandeered all tusks. Only the particulate matter. The very fallen. All tusks. Only the particulate matter. The very follicles. Yeah, I have to leave you alone and give you your mouth back. The god-offless thing on this bleak earth. Some say an army of horse people. But I say it's. So I'm going to read a few poems now from Advice for Lovers, which came out a couple of years ago from City Lights. copies if you want to buy one for me later. This is the epigraph for the book. I think is relevant. It's from George Herbert. His poem, Love Three. And he writes, You must sit down says love and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat. This is called the Philistines smitten. Bien sûr, j'arrive. I take this kerosene teamly at tombé orte. There was no open vision. Phineas is dead and the Ark of God is taken. Tombé sur le nœud. They brought about the Ark of the Dead to us. Also my sir, hey Zee. Plagues were sent. Ark. Philistines. Trespass offerings. Idolatrous priestesses and Dagon upon its face. Zee is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure. Then we shall begin to say to the mountains, fall on us. This is called on not being able to perceive angels. And it was set to music by the poets Brandon Brown and Ali Warren. So I'm going to try to sing how I remember they transliterated it or mutated it or whatever. On not being able to perceive angels. In the twilight low, I stood before the twilight. Without even a moon, jacking up the artifice. The proverbial number of angels that could fit on the head of a pin. Before whom and in what habit I speak. Stop me at the very vestibule and rip up my ticket. One frosty address will not diminish one job. My vegetable love. My vegetable love. My vegetable love. My vegetable love. Deep image to Venus. And it has two epigraphs, one's from Elizabeth Marie Young. Eels caught bright-eyed in the rafters. And one from Gary Snyder. Horses gleaming and healing in the white sun. What horse went gleaming headlong and chuffing. What ghost went wheezing purple and chuffing none. Meanwhile, the ants are fat on the fat, lugging the cake lit. The wind moored after that. To the Bato East juggling the rigging. Confounding the sailor with chest ringing, I sang my song. I lost my joie de vivre and so I sing this since I hate to live. Venus, it's so unruly of the sheep to fuck me in the ass instead of sleep. Why don't you come here from out your grotto and take me in the front and make our motto. Let's this or that, let's hard and then let's harder. Beast at my back, love at my garter. And this is called On How to Transfigure the Body Utterly. And it has an epigraph from Elizabeth Browning. I wail, I wail, and certis that is true. I practically ran to get out all these lonesome shoes. Shut up inside the shop I was raging like a bull. Maddened in the minutes of the race, reaching more up than across, I saw the gold foil facade of a house built on corpses, of a sea composed entirely of horses all running to their death. Oh, I wish to the Lord I'd never been born Or died when I was young Then I'd never have seen your shining blue eye Or heard your lying tongue Into this ugly and howly world was I awakened The morning star met with its wanderer All the good times are past and gone This habitat and bred me like a shrivel Be with me always, take any form Love is like, love is like falconry. Okay, so I'm just going to read one more. This is a poem I wrote for the San Francisco poet Evan Kennedy. And he writes, he's writing these poems inspired by St. Francis of Assisi. And if you remember, St. Francis had this famous sermon to the birds. And so this sort of is responding to Assisi through the mouth of Evan Kennedy. And in his poem he addresses you birds. And so this is from the perspective of the birds. And Evan's quote is senseless metiers, my welcome into a kind of gaggle if you birds will. And from Don Lundy Martin, I opened my unfit beak. So this is called We Birds. The first false spring is here. The dirty snow is melting. We birds arch our neck for the worm, believe in turning a blind eye to get it. We molted too soon. Spring was receding ever as it tempted us to deal in cryptocurrencies. And Mount Gox is bust. We birds fly into the orange sky, illumined against the gray flash above the Marcy Street projects. Little one breaks flock. How long do I have to stay in character? The sun finally bore no resemblance to the one who stood before us, all esteemed with moxie. The last time a human stood, nose quivering against the scene of devastation. A fire truck whose wheels spin out profess grade portraits that speak in fish language. Who can distinguish between civil, nautical, and astronomical twilight? Eye rocked of, eye seagull, rat of the sky, worm wings like an eagle. I'm told I am getting more of everything, more cake, more worms, more orifices and things to go in the orifices. Two horses succeed where the truck failed, despite their clumsiness and their face blindness. I lost my fortune to the wild boar what gored me. I pressed my eye to the keyhole and fell away. The scientist was pointing to the tell-tale snow leopard scat saying, from my own species perspective, I salute you. Are we all just worms in the wind trying to stick ourselves to a branch? You'll know it's cold when the mountains turn blue. Lizard that looks like a dandelion, beetle that looks like a rock, whose skill in catching fishes like water off a duck's back, only a bear in the river shaking its coat. Bear with the fondness for fishes, bird with the fondness for crab cakes, river that flows both ways. Painful rube and the shallows don't know how to smoke, fuck, drink, eventually was made to eat the meat. Shakespeare had a sovereign, not a sister. I said to the dog, you're every creature, and if the stars do seem in night to pray, who prefers this springy grass to the salted concrete? We birds go down to the milky river between the ochre cliffs. Knowing life depends on the consumption of bodies by other bodies. An arm or a channel or a valley reveals itself. Parched begonia, long-suffering aloe. To top it off, it was the end times. One bird called it lagrim de lagrim. Candles were conveyed, hmm, placed as if a gift. Gazelle predator, predator gazelle, snow leopard in snow. The whole thing was a mare's nest. Students placed glasses in a shopping cart. Now it was a drone. Now it was a gnome that sat itself on a rock that could disappear itself at will, that seemed to dispense wisdom. Saying things like, picture a collie made entirely of melons. Melon collie. The face, the face of the one that took your meds. I love not snow leopards the less, but birds more. Converted into aversion. Converted into aversion. March is by turns a lionish lamb, a lambish lion. Uncouple us from our crime, where castles are horses, objects for fire or war. Kiss us on our split lip, our bloody snout, our bent beak. Something wicked this way comes. Books will be made of oblong coal, styluses of liquid metal. I know what the story is supposed to be, and supposedly my place in it. By the time it was not supposed to have mattered, I had given up my crumpet. And the creature that climbs on the high crags, something St. Mary. Nor will we use technology, nor will we hook up from where we're seated ten feet across from each other. Who is the creature itself and not its avatar, at least for now. The mountaintop stone flinch as the avalanche gets going. We birds do not pluck at the cakes given to Osiris on that eastern side of the Narrows, whose hair was thought to be made of lapis. In the end, we all had to eat worms. In the end, all we had to eat was worms. In the end, we all had worms to eat. Thank you. Thank you, Julianne, Talamantha, Gulaski. There's books here, you can get them afterwards. Advice for lovers is amazing, so you should grab some.